President Donald Trump Cancels North Korea Summit

Pyongyang in response says it is willing to meet ‘at any time, in any way’

Reprinted from: Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump scrapped plans for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, citing “open hostility” from the North Korean regime, as the White House considered dozens of sanctions on Pyongyang.

Mr. Trump on Thursday canceled the meeting without informing allies, including South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who visited Washington this week.

North Korea said it is still willing to meet with Mr. Trump. “We express our willingness to sit down face-to-face with the U.S. and resolve issues anytime and in any format,” Kim Kye Gwan, a senior North Korea foreign ministry official and a longtime interlocutor with the U.S. on nuclear issues, said in a statement published by the North’s official state media.

“If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write,” Mr. Trump wrote in the letter. The president ordered the White House to release the letter before alerting allies to avoid leaks, a White House official said.

In Washington, Mr. Trump’s critics said he had been taken for a ride by the North Korean leader. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi declared Mr. Kim “the big winner.”

”It’s clear he didn’t know what he was getting into,” she said about Mr. Trump, “and now he’s walking away from it in this very chummy, palsy-walsy letter to Kim Jong Un.”

But Victor Cha, an Asia expert at the White House during the George W. Bush administration, praised Mr. Trump for showing he was “not willing to walk into an uncertain situation with so much on the line.”

“If dialogue channels continue, then there is an avenue for more prenegotiations leading to a summit in the future,” said Mr. Cha, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Still, not clear where we go from here. More North Korea missile tests? More U.S. military exercises? We could end up back where we were in 2017, which was not a good place.”

A U.S. intelligence official told The Wall Street Journal there was a notable shift in Mr. Kim’s attitude immediately following his meeting with Mr. Xi. Intelligence officials assessed that Mr. Xi had some influence on that shift in an effort to place pressure on the Trump administration, the official said.

The cancellation may be more welcomed by China, which diplomats and analysts say has grown concerned that it was being marginalized in negotiations over the future of the Korean Peninsula.

China now will have time to reassert itself as a power broker in negotiations and possibly to use that as leverage in its trade dispute with the U.S. Without the summit, U.S. policy toward Pyongyang once again will depend largely on getting Beijing—as North Korea’s biggest trade partner—to enforce United Nations sanctions, as it did over the past year or so.

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